


The Carpenter and the Noose

by CallMeAlexis



Category: Original Work
Genre: Depression, Hope, Hopeful Ending, Nonfiction, dream - Freeform, improvement, mental health, original - Freeform, self help
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-28
Updated: 2015-04-28
Packaged: 2018-03-26 03:59:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3836203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CallMeAlexis/pseuds/CallMeAlexis





	The Carpenter and the Noose

I have a theory about life, the universe, and everything. Or moreover, a theory about how to destroy a human soul from the inside out. 

All people have a rope inside them that holds all their pieces together. Some are short, some are long, and some are thin, and some are thick, but regardless of the size, it’s one of those ropes with two main pieces that are twisted together. It’s one of those ropes that’s held together only because there’s hundreds and hundreds of twisted fibers, wrapped so tightly they can barely move. 

When I was thirteen, a carpenter began sawing away at that rope, small bits at a time. I was okay for a while, and didn’t feel it too badly. As the pieces of fiber broke one by one, I felt mounting anxiety, but it was manageable. Thirteen year olds are supposed to be anxious, anyway. Just blame it on hormones. 

By the time I turned fourteen, on a birthday that saw me wearing a pink dress with my hair piled on top of my head, and a smile on my face, I realized I wasn’t okay. I looked in the mirror and thought that if anyone stared deeply enough at the gap between my front teeth, they would see that I was empty all the way inside, except for that fraying, fraying rope. 

And on my fourteenth birthday, when I danced with a nine year old girl who had the stars in her eyes, I realized that I didn’t my eyes had dimmed, at a point in time that I couldn’t remember, and I had missed it. And all the while, that carpenter keeped sawing away at that fraying, fraying rope. 

I didn’t cry on my first day of high school, which I thought was a small victory. But I cried on the second, third, and fourth, and fifth days. And I think it was within a week that I knew that half the rope was gone, gone while I had been convincing myself that there was nothing wrong with me. The fraying rope had split in two, the right side of the rope just hanging there, a mixture of emotions and unwritten poetry and simply numbness. 

It hung there, the loose tooth I’d neglected for too long. And still, the carpenter kept sawing, worse and worse, and worse and worse. I figured it was just as good as gone. 

But I was wrong. 

I didn’t care that I was wrong, though. I thought it was right that the rope was breaking, and that maybe it was supposed to break. Maybe I could help the carpenter, too. And so I took a razor in my small fingertips and started sawing at it, too, as if to validate the fact that I was hurting. As if my own path of self-destruction made it okay, because at least I knew that no one could hate me more than I hated myself. Self destruction is so much easier than recovery--than even accepting that I had a problem. 

At the end of my first year of high school, my carpenter was still at his work. But a spark within me began grasping at the crumbling fibers and gluing them back together. 

I didn’t even know why I bothered, but maybe it was because I was looking to find the stars that I had once left behind. 

But it wasn’t easy. I ran out of glue. And once I ran out of glue, I reached out for anything I could find. I grasped at straws, at love, at friends, at the stickiness of ink when it dried on my fingers. I wrote words until my hands cramped and the words blurred into meaningless inkblots on paper. When I ran out of ink, I scraped up my tears, and a bit of blood, and tried to use that instead. And when I ran out of tears, I used hatred. Hatred burned the fibers back together, but they solidified so very uglily. 

It worked for a time, though, and the heartless carpenter (I call him depression) began to slow. One by one, my feelings came back, and the numbness seeped back to the ocean from whence it came. 

Anger came back first, with hatred, and I had with the full force of my two-and-a-half numb years. The anxiety that had plagued me before came back, too, and I wondered if it was worth it--if feelings were worth it, that is. I rather thought they weren’t. I started undoing all the glue again with a razor I had thrown away. 

I felt hideous, and I hated. And I wanted to kill or be killed, or both, but the screen that masked my bitterness protected me and those around me. But at the same time, I was building myself up, wrapping fibers together and likewise destroying the ones I had mended. 

But then came my ability to love, to empathize. To care. I realized that the two years I had spent pretend-smiling through silent tears, and listening begrudgingly to people’s worries and fears, had been worth it. 

I was hit with some sort of soft light. It wasn’t like all my problems went away, but I was hit with utter relief that I loved the people I had been pretending to love for so long. I was grateful not just to them, but to myself, for choosing these people and maintaining relationships despite my desire to curl up into a corner and fall into neverending sleep. 

And so I put away my weapons and simply asked my friends for glue. I gave them pieces of myself, real pieces, and they showed me how to put myself back together. And so despite my carpenter’s attempts to make me break, daily, everyday, and despite how often I feel like I’m losing my mind, and despite how hard it is for me to want to live, I’m getting better. Slowly, gradually, inconsistently. With a lot of tears, and hatred, frustration, and pervasive fear. But I’m getting better. And now, it’s possible for me to have enough hope to carry on--if not for today, for tomorrow.


End file.
